Good. Now, just round that out with some academic background in History, and we should see eye to eye on many things… 
Let’s try an experiment, Tim.
You cited an article from 2006, by someone accusing me of quote mining Eric Davidson. I spent nearly two weeks with Davidson in southern China, in June 1999, and got to know his views about textbook neo-Darwinian theory quite well.
So tell me – in 2015, shortly before his death, what were Davidson’s views about neo-Darwinism? Would those views support the accusation of quote-mining or not?
Give me your informed opinion, and then we’ll look at the evidence.
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Joke is missing a punch line. Start over.
Not all humor works by punch lines. I wasn’t trying to be Bob Hope. Ever heard of a form of humor called “satire”?
Judging by the results, you should stick to punch lines.
Tough audience tonight!
Take your argument. Please!
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No Paul.
Let’s not follow that red herring.
What may, or may not, have been “Davidson’s views” in 2015 (even if these could be ascertained), are not relevant to the question of whether your quote accurately represents the views that Davidison and Erwin expressed in their 2006 article ‘Gene regulatory networks and the evolution of animal body plans’.
I note that you carefully evaded the substance of Steve Verdon’s accusation.
And, if we’re on the topic of Paul Nelson, Eric Davidson, and misrepresenting Davidson’s views, here’s a Jerry Coyne post from 2012, when Davidson was still alive, and so could (and did) speak for himself: A Marshall McLuhan moment with creationist Paul Nelson – Why Evolution Is True
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No Eddie.
PC is a form of OEC, it is not the same thing as OEC simpliciter.
Put humorously:
Life arose, somehow. But God wasn't happy with the result, so kept tinkering, changing lifeforms into slightly different lifeforms over the hundreds of millions of years.
That’s exactly rigth.
That is why I wrote that MN, as @pnelson describes it, is foreign to me as a practicing scientist. Ironically, he also agrees, and argues that MN (as he understands it) isn’t even practiced by scientist and never was. So why not actually discuss MN as it is actually practiced by scientists?
Turns out, highly ironically, MN is aspired to ID and creationist scientists too. We all aspire to avoid invoking ad hoc miracles to explain away data. Though I’d say that mainstream science is better at achieving that aspiration than ID and ID, in turn, is better than YEC.
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Of course not. Why look at evidence? Much easier to make accusations.
You can ascertain Davidson’s 2015 views for yourself. Go here; see p. S25.
“Since the body plans are made by development, when you consider evolution of different kinds of animals, it means their developmental process is different. How else can you think about it? Darwinian evolution was of a completely different kind. It was all about small changes and they felt if you could understand changes in petunia colors, you could understand changes in whether animals have heads or not. And that’s just total nonsense. But you can’t really blame the Darwinians, because all of Darwinian theory, from the Neo-Darwinian synthesis of the 1930s, was built in the absence of, and ignorance of, any knowledge of how development actually works. Other than wrong theoretical ideas. And in the absence of any knowledge about how transcription works and in the absence of any knowledge about anything that has to do with how the processes of life that make animals actually occur. So it couldn’t possibly have been right, and it wasn’t.”
As for Coyne’s 2012 stunt. Let’s not be naive. A University of Chicago biology professor and outspoken atheist contacts you, out of the blue, wanting to know if you consent to being cited by a notorious ID advocate.
Sure, no problem, you say. Right. Like that’s ever going to happen in any imaginable scientific universe.
Take a look at Michael Lynch’s recent remarks about natural selection. You can download chapter drafts of his forthcoming book from his webpage at the BioDesign Institute, Arizona State. See what Lynch says when Jerry Coyne isn’t emailing him about this guy Paul Nelson, who’s a threat to science.
I stand by every citation that Coyne went after in his 2012 bullying episode.
You have a taste for slander, Tim.
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What on Earth makes you think that? 
Not only do I have a tendency to form my own opinions of what I’m taught, but my impression of academic History is that it contains a whole constellation of conflicting interpretations. The chances of it instilling in me views that exactly align with yours would be … somewhat low.
Because, Paul A. Nelson, I have just explained why that evidence you cite is irrelevant!
The quoted article ( https://www.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~b92069/HWs/796.pdf ) and only that article, is relevant to what Davidson and Erwin meant in that article.
You have again completely avoided answering Steve Verdon’s accusation of quotemining against you.
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What makes you think I’m sufficiently naive as to take your characterisation of the incident at face value? If they held the views you claimed them to, but were embarrassed by the fact, at worst I’d expect them to extemporise and/or offer a neutral non-responsive ‘reply’ (or simply fail to reply to Coyne’s inquiry). But they didn’t. They completely contradicted you.
I think the “evidence”, in this matter at least, is both relevant, and speaks for itself.
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Equivocal.
Equivocal.
Equivocal.
Equivocal.
The reality of an Intelligent Designer and Supreme Creator God makes predictions about what we should observe in those data and it does and astounding job at doing so. That is what makes the reality of an Intelligent Designer and Supreme Creator God “scientific and empirical”.
My impression of academic biology is that in contains a whole constellation of conflicting interpretations of evolutionary mechanism, but that’s compatible with most biologists agreeing that evolution actually happened and that many of its mechanisms have been identified. Similarly, historians have conflicting interpretations of all kinds of things, but they tend toward consensus on certain broad things.
For example, very few academic historians hold any longer to the “warfare thesis” regarding religion and science; most are aware, due to decades of research, that the interpenetration of science and religion over the past 800 years or so has been complicated and that a much more nuanced account is required.
The idea that Christianity has contributed important elements to the modern psyche, to modern culture, to modern social and political thought, is widely held by very competent historians, sociologists, political theorists, religion scholars, etc. There is of course disagreement about the weighting of various Christian and non-Christian causes of anything – that’s what scholars do, disagree about things like that. But very few scholars would say that Christianity was a non-factor in the rise of modernity, that modernity was a complete rejection of Christianity, or anything like that. Such extreme views tend to be found in popular venues rather than in detailed scholarly works.
The list of books I sent to you privately should go some way toward replacing your “impression of academic history” with some actual “knowledge of academic history.” Happy reading!
I don’t get no respect.
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Eddie. That horse is dead. It died quite some time ago. Put down that stick and move away from it.
(Parenthetically, this sort of argumentum ad nauseam is not the way to convince me of anything, other than that I should perhaps avoid you. I already gave my brief final thoughts to you in PM, in reply to a longer PM of your own, and thereafter received a further PM of yet-another attempt on your part to convince me of various points.)
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Where? I can’t find it. You are posting more. That’s great. Did we ever do an introduction thread for you? If not, we should. What can you tell us about yourself?
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Because he doesn’t have the first clue. Erwin, for instance, has argued for the past two decades that evolutionary processes at (for instance) the Cambrian Explosion are not well-modeled by neo-Darwinian theory. Do your homework before you circulate the slanders of others.
As I said before, I stand by my citations attacked by Coyne in 2012. In his most recent writings, Michael Lynch, for instance, has called natural selection a “religious commitment” on the part of evolutionary biologists. Try sending that to Jerry Coyne for commentary.
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